Wat Tyler - soothscribe

On Burning our Money, the ever-readable Wat Tyler (historical reference here) has written the first intelligent and balanced report on what is really going on at the Tory conference that I have seen on ANY media.

Cam's Big Society certainly hadn't gripped anyone Tyler spoke to, despite hours of worthy attempts to explain what it might actually mean in practical terms. The reason everyone struggles with the concept of course, is that we don't yet know how the space vacated by a shrinking government will be filled.

According to the BBC and the rest of the left, nothing will fill the space other than disease, ignorance, and giant snakes. But for those of us who believe in markets, the space will soon be filled by the education and health-care equivalents of M&S, Tescos, and BUPA. Oh, BUPA fills part of the space already - that's handy.

Because under a market based approach, there is no clear cut master plan you can announce upfront. You can never be quite sure ahead of time precisely how things will pan out - you only discover that once the market has done its magic work. And for many people, that's a very scary prospect.

The technical term is Prospect Theory - the loss of something generates greater regret than the prospect of winning something better promotes a sense of gain; which, allied to fear of failure, leads to the Status Quo Bias or "Devil you know" syndrome, by which people are willing to risk more to maintain a position than they were to gain it in the first place.